Abstract

Private market entry has several requirements such as easy access to financial capital, access to social networks, and low level of bureaucracy. One additional factor which is often overlooked is access to knowledge capital as to whether this is in the form of intangible human capital, ideas, or written information. The type of a high-tech industry such as the nanotechnology industry requires knowledge to be transferred mainly from universities to the private sector. This could of course be done via the help of incubation or technology transfer centers which both work closely with the universities. However, as we will explain in detail below, industry clusters provide a complete circuit of knowledge transfer among companies and from universities to companies in a continuous and a more sustainable manner. There might be, however, variety of challenges to support such mechanism in developing countries. We will give the Turkish example as it describes those challenges in an eye-opening way. Below we list those challenges and try offering solutions to them.